A colleague, client, and friend of mine, Sean Kidney, is in Copenhagen at the moment working toward a low-carbon future. He is part of the Climate Bonds Initiative which is looking to gather large-scale investment in clean energy and low carbon technologies through the deployment of government-secured bonds.

This morning he has sent the email below regarding the move to low-emissions transport. Many of these seem achievable to me (given that I ride a bike and don’t own a car), but how about for you? Would you reduce your car use by 60% and stop flying for some of the time?

SEAN KIDNEY SAYS:

I’ve just come from a sobering presentation in Copenhagen by Yuki Tanaka of the Japanese Institution of Transport Policy Studies. They have done detailed modeling of global transport emissions and how we can reduce them by 2050.

They’ve done different scenarios, and have settled on pushing for keeping emissions at 2000 levels because they believe the lower scenarios are not likely to be achieved. I started off sceptically, thinking “we’ll need to figure out how to do better than that”. But by the end of the presentation, overwhelmed by the robustness of their research, I can see why they made that decision.

Bear in mind this is in the context of rapidly growing economies in Asia and Latin America.